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Less is More. What information really has to be there for sense? Is it clear? Does the reader have to work to get it?

Think vertically. Horizontal space is precious

Complicated graphics are still worth it. But you will have to do it differently for mobile

If you’re working with a graphics team talk to them early, with a quick description of the concept to visualise, and with any relevant data you already have.

If you’re working with charting tools, think vertically, beware of over-labelling and create several charts if one is going to be a mess.

If you’re not working with either of those, try chart blocks, RAWGraphics or other tools available online.
From Colleen McEnaney, graphics editor of the Wall Street Journal, speaking at News:Rewired today.

Martin Stabe, head of FT interactive news, added his three priorities for data visualisations:

Wallpaper’s Tony Chambers and Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman featured in the BSME’s first ever conference. The audience at Central Saint Martins in London heard plenty of tips about how to make brilliant magazines and how to keep those brands up to date in the digital age. Here are some of them.

7 steps to making a magazine into an iconic brand – and even an adjective:

1) “Design is crucial to the business we work in,” he said, “now more than ever”. Tony made the move from the design department to editorial. His first job was on the Sunday Times magazine, “bringing words and pictures together to create visual stories” to inform and entertain readers. “Art departments didn’t get the credit then that they do now.”

2) Take the magazine off page. Go beyond the print magazine. When he joined Wallpaper it was in the early days of brand extensions – there were Wallpaper Puma trainers tumbling out of the office cupboards. It was in a strong position to go further. Tony showed some slides from his 2007 pitch to be editor. ‘Wallpaper* is not a magazine!’ one stated, ‘Wallpaper is a brand’. “Now everyone realises they have to do more than ink on paper.” Tony ran through the extraordinary range of Wallpaper products from events like the Festival and special ‘influencer’ salon dinners for brands, through to travel guides that don’t make you look like a tourist. There are now guides to all the coolest cities in the world – “even Liverpool”.

3) “Being hated is better than being ignored”. Wallpaper was avant-garde. It was elitist but “in a good way”. People loved it or loathed it.

4) Add surprise. Wallpaper was becoming “a bit of a parody of itself” and there was a worry it could become an albatross. “People started to refer to things as very Wallpaper”. So Tony decided to start doing things that were not very Wallpaper in that people didn’t expect them – to shake them out of the comfort zone.

5) Grow digital – but not at the expense of print. Wallpaper launched online back in 2003 but it used different content to avoid cannibalising the magazine and giving it away for free, unlike the newspapers which made the great mistake of just “transferring print to online”. Investing in new material for the web site “cost money, time and effort but it was one of the first magazine web sites to turn a profit early on.”

6) Print still matters. “Print is still the flagship – now more than ever.” he has had guest editors like designer Dieter Rams and artist Jeff Koons, allowed architect Zaha Hadid to ‘cut a hole’ in the magazine and even made a scratch and sniff cover for the design awards issue. Wallpaper bespoke is “upmarket advertorials basically” that make the magazine look good as well as bring a revenue stream. Will print ever die? “It’s different in different markets but it will survive because it delivers content in a different way to a digital platform.” In print the “message is more resonant and reaches people in a deeper fashion.” However, he said the biggest fear for print comes from fear itself. Printers and paper suppliers are under threat and the method to actually produce it could be in danger.

7) “Never ever be normal,” he insisted. “Avoid normalness. You don’t want to be normal – you have to produce the extraordinary.”

Tony Chambers brought in his Mark Boxer Award from last year’s BSME awards in order for it to be taken away to be engraved with the new winner’s name for presentation at the 2016 awards next month.

Session 2 Panel: How to future-proof you and your brand

Conor McNicholas, AllTogetherNow

Abba Newbery, Creative Solutions & Commercial Strategy Consultant

Noel Penzer, Time Out Digital

Moderator: Lucie Cave, Heat

1) There is a danger of trying to do too many things in our rush to catch up with consumers, even if the average consumer is scrolling 14 miles per day. Focus on the business model not the technology platform first, says Conor. We tend to approach the platform first, testing and learning. “Zoom in on what works,” he says, “but finding out what works is the key thing.”

2) The magazine product is not the problem, says Conor, it’s adjusting changing behaviours. The problem is footfall in the newsagents, not the magazines on the shelves.

3) Editors are so good at focusing on their audience. They put people first and respect them, said Conor. “They have a massive edge to move into that space…They have the keys to the castle because they operate in a truly audience focused world.”

4) Editors know how to tell great stories. Advertisers talk about story telling and brand advertising, said Abba. They spend millions on audience research but editors know how to do those things. “Brands + stories + audience is a powerful combination and it’s surprising we’re only getting to that point now,” she said.

5) Advertising production budgets allow editors to present great content to the reader that might otherwise be too expensive. Think about the opportunity to produce something brilliant rather than ‘Oh no, I’ve got to write some advertorial,’ explained Abba. Shape it before it becomes solid and it’s a done deal, says Conor

6) Editors know how to draw the lines in the sand. Readers need to know where a message is really coming from says Conor. Signpost it so the readers don’t have to unpick where it comes from. Don’t blur the lines, said Abba, because journalists still need to be journalists and may later need to criticise that brand.

7) Print is still powerful. Eye-tracking technology shows people look at print ads around three times longer than digital ones, said Abba. People like layouts and they like curation. People can’t cope with thousands of articles a day designed in an ugly way. User experiences need to improve and editors can help

8) Treat Facebook and Google as friends but be careful. Mobile is the fastest growing channel, said Noel so social media and search can be useful in many ways, “as long as you understand what you’re giving up.” Conor recalled the day he discovered at his first Arctic Monkeys concert that NME’s readers had been “talking to each other without our permission.” That phenomenon isn’t going away, he said.

9) Editors could make the digital experience more ‘human shaped’ said Conor, and we should develop the confidence to say we “don’t have to fit ourselves into Facebook and Google shaped worlds.” We got excited about navigating by search and ended up allowing Google to shape the whole experience, he thought. Editors have been designing the user experience for 150 years.

10) Magazines are brands too so stay true to them. The audience is the focus for Time Out, said Noel, and its readers love fancy food markets, silent discos and screenings of Jurassic Park in the Natural History Museum. “But stay true to who you are.” If it only warrants two stars, then you have to give it two stars.

Session 3: Sam Baker, The Pool

Interviewer: Zoe Williams, Guardian Columnist & Author

Sam Baker left Red magazine after 6 years to set up a new site for women. “The aspiration gap was starting to become unbridgeable,” she said. “The audience loved the content but couldn’t get past the advertising.” Noticing how the agile, digital-only brands were quicker to capitalise on new ideas, she made the “insanely arrogant” move to start an online-only women’s magazine. She talked about the unwritten ‘rules’ of the male-dominated tech and finance worlds that she had to break to do it, as well as how she had to bring the best from the ‘analogue’ world of print.

Here are the ingredients that went into the launch of The Pool:

1) A little bit of ‘Old Media’ – the knowledge of how to write stuff that will appeal to the audience rather than the ‘scatter-gun’ approach of digital content: throw as much as you can at the wall in the hope some sticks. Let’s not do that, she said. Let’s ask people what they want and then we’ll make the thing. “All I did was to take people who know how to make good content in ‘old media’ and put them in a new world. The people making hay in digital weren’t that good at content.”

2) The habit of radio. “There are women who say ‘I don’t know what I used to do in the morning before I had The Pool – that’s what we set out to do,” Sam explains.”Our number one objective was to create habit.”

3) Just enough from a one-day coding course to hold your own as a ‘knowledgeable buyer from the code-writers – the “mechanics of the 21st century” in terms of their attitude to clients.

4) Not too many words, not too few. Digital media companies say people want to read very short pieces of under a minute or much longer pieces of 15 or 20 minutes. Yet The Pool found that its most popular articles were those that take around 4 minutes to read around 800 words.

5) No comments on the page. If people want to comment they can do it in social media and spread the word at the same time. She got stick for being the old media trying to control the agenda, but women online have had enough of abuse so why provide the platform for more? Sam pointed out Twitter’s done little to control the trolls and has paid the price in losing Salesforce as a major potential investor.

6) Donald Trump. The Pool’s articles go to opinion fast. And Donald Trump opinion pieces always does well. Leather jackets worn to The Oscars took only a few minutes to write but did even better. And while a Calais camp story got 1.5m retweets, she reckons only thousands actually read it – the rest just ‘wanted to be seen to care’.

7) Don’t be creepy. Build a picture of what the users are interested in to serve them targeted things, but it’s “important to not be creepy”. The Pool spoke to several hundred women to build a pattern of their day – not just what they read but where – and built the content delivery around that. Sam said she’s often asked at digital media conferences what algorithms she used to launch The Pool. “Well, we talked to people,” she says.

Session 4: Alexandra Shulman, Vogue

Interviewer: Louise Chunn, welldoing.com

Q: About 10 years ago a newspaper editor said to me: “I hope to get out of the business before the Internet took over.” Clearly, it has taken over and of course he’s no longer a newspaper editor but you’re still here, having had a long period of being the editor of Vogue. How do you feel about a digital future? Do you think there will always be a print edition of Vogue and do you ever imagine there will be a Vogue that will be given away free at a tube station?

A: No. That is not going to happen. That I can safely say. It would make no sense for the business model of the magazine. It’s not given away anywhere at the moment and it’s not going to be. In terms of will there always be a print magazine, I mean I don’t have a crystal ball, I couldn’t answer that but certainly, I can’t imagine in the next decade or so why you would not have a print magazine. It might not be monthly, it might be more expensive and a bigger magazine, lots more print, I don’t know what it’ll be but I think that the thing that we’ve got is very important. I often talk to students, and you can get an app of the magazine and obviously you can go on the map for free but they like to buy it because it’s the real thing, it’s an object Vogue.
Q: And that’s more so for Vogue than other magazines?

A: Well I don’t like to talk about other magazines because I don’t know them but I think there are other magazines that I think that’s true of. I think where magazines are finding it hardest can replicate the content of the magazine so easily on something disposable and free or on the website for free. Don’t get me wrong; the Stylist, which is a fantastic magazine, is free. I have endless admiration for what they do; I don’t think ours is the only way.

Q: What’s the interplay between the print Vogue and the website on a daily basis? For example, when you’re commissioning a cover feature, are you also spending a lot of time thinking how it might work online?

A: In all honesty, not a great deal. I know that’s what we’re meant to be doing. When it comes to a cover, I’m thinking about what cover I think’s going to sell the magazine and I make those decisions on that basis. Once it’s been decided who’s going to be on the cover, we will then set about seeing how we can work online, in particular with video and then that will go into play, and then nearer the time, then we’ll start working about the social media program and working with people’s agents on that but the original idea of the cover, is still really driven by what I think will sell a magazine at a news stand for £3.99.

Q&A this morning with Richard George, Corporate Communications Manager for LinkedIn. Thanks to The Hospital Club for hosting this meeting in London.

Richard started by urging everyone to complete their profiles on LInkedIn with:

1) A photo – because people remember faces and so when they are looking online for someone they met it will help them to identify the right person.

2) Important keywords will help your profile to be found in LinkedIn

3) Endorsements – they all add up to raise your profile.

Using LinkedIn for journalism

A useful tool for journalism is the Advanced Search – the top right button can you help find the right people to provide comment on a story for example. You can search by keywords and important words form a job title like ‘director’ or ‘publisher’. You can then connect with them using a mutual contact (shown on right) or through a Premium account. You can also filter it by past employees, who may be more inclined to comment about a former employer than those currently employed by that company. Results are customised for each member and their network. Company profiles include recent changes such as staff changes that may be leads for stories.

Promoting your magazine

Your magazine readers are probably already on LInkedIn, and it’s a professional environment particularly useful for B2B magazines. There’s less flaming and trolling than on other social networks. You can promote your magazine through the Company Profile or by forming a Group. Running a LinkedIn Group is like running a magazine, he suggested, and requires planning out your activity according to the editorial diary, what’s new, what you want readers to engage with, and listening to readers. LinkedIn Pulse shows what professionals are talking about and sharing, which could provide story ideas. Get a story trending at will float to the top of the Pulse page. There is also Influencers; Richard Branson now has more followers on LinkedIn than on Twitter. Peak periods on LinkedIn used to be weekdays, 9 to 5, but the LinkedIn app is extending this into the mornings and evenings.

Making and breaking Connections

There were many questions about ‘curating’ contacts. To ‘unconnect’ with someone, just open a profile and choose the last option on the prominent pulldown menu. LinkedIn won’t let contacts know they have been ‘disconnected’, nor that you have turned down a request to connect. If you don’t want them to see you have looked at their profile, you can ensure they don’t in your settings through ‘Select what others see when you’ve viewed their profile’, where you can customise your level of privacy as often as you like. You can also customise the alerts on Connections’ work anniversaries.

Richard recommends members should choose quality over quantity of connections, although journalists might expect to have more contacts than other professionals.

This is a sad update to post so I will keep it short. The Trustees of the IET have with regret decided to close Flipside magazine after nearly ten years of publication.

Over the years Flipside entertained and inspired millions of teenagers and I hope they enjoyed reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together. As well as showing them what fun you could have as a scientist or engineer, Flipside was the first proper magazine after comics for many young teenagers and may even have got them into the reading habit.

The last issue will be the next one out in early July. I’d like to thank everyone involved for their hard work in making it such a great magazine.

Flipside arrives on tablets this month. We did some focus groups with teenage readers in schools last year where we asked them what they thought about magazines on tablets and showed them a few mockups. Most had very limited experience of digital magazines, and couldn’t at first see the point of them.

“There’s something about just reading a magazine, the glossy pages,” remarked one of the young teenagers – a comment you wouldn’t be surprised to hear from a middle-aged magazine buyer. But they liked even quite simple interactivity such as pull-up text (“Oh wow!”), interactive diagrams or video clips (“Something like a building blowing up!”).

Print remains appealing to that age group, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, but their interest in our iPad mockup shows tablet magazines could have a great future with that generation – even if it means the tablet magazine evolves into something that we can’t yet imagine.

Flipside has long had a simple little gallery app for smartphones but we’re now launching a more substantial, ‘enhanced’ edition for tablets, featuring some of the best features from each issue of the magazine along with extras like interactive graphics and animations. The tablet edition will be free to existing subscribers as part of a combined print and digital subscription package. The ‘digital only’ subscription will be available through Apple’s Newsstand and Google Play.

Our app for iOS is awaiting approval by Apple. The Android version is already on Google Play but we haven’t told anyone it’s there yet. Before we do, we’d like to update it on the next Digital Publishing Suite release due out this coming weekend. We’ll also be using that release to update the E&T magazine app with a version that works on Android 4.4.
We plan to convert the simple Flipside 10s phone app (on the Yudu platform) into a ‘Flipside Lite’ international edition – a digital replica that leaves out the articles that only make much sense in the UK.

Our latest issue of E&T looks at the potential for augmented reality. This technology uses the camera and screen to take a live scene in front of you – a street, a product or a magazine page for instance – and to bring it add extra information over it. The virtual reality part then tracks the reality viewed through the camera. The best way is to try it for yourself – download the Blippar app and try it out on the E&T cover in my home page to see it ‘come alive’. Here is a snap of what you should see but a still image doesn’t do it justice. Many thousands of E&T readers have tried it out already and we are about to produce the first one on Flipside magazine.

I have always liked pictograms – those universally recognisable graphic signs to guide people around airports, or the beautifully designed sets of sport icons that are part of each Olympic Games. Thanks to David McCullough, our new designer on E&T’s art desk, we now have a pictogram set for engineering – or the fourteen Grand Challenges of Engineering to be precise. This was a list originally devised by the American National Academy of Engineering. E&T’s special issue marks the Global Grand Challenges Summit in London this month.

Buses, Bankers and the Beer of Revenge: an Eccentric Engineer Collection is the first book to come from E&T magazine. Justin Pollard (left in the picture) has been writing his Eccentric Engineer column for E&T for five years now and this book brings his witty and surprising pieces together in one volume in time for Christmas 2012. The launch is today at Savoy Place, the IET’s home building in London. E&T features editor Vitali Vitaliev (right in the picture) commissioned the original columns from Justin and planned the book. I can’t claim to have done much on it beyond putting my name to a foreword but we’re all proud of it. Buy it from the E&T webshop, Amazon and other booksellers. Containing fifty unlikely but true stories, from Roman turbines and Greek computers to cars made out of beans and aircraft carriers made of ice.